Welcome to the Roman Baths Blog!

Wednesday, 18 November 2015

Cataloguing museum collections is no mean feat. Back in 2011
The Roman Baths Collections team, helped by some hardy volunteers spent a
number of days recording archaeological material held in the basement of
Keynsham Town hall. These were objects excavated from three key sites in
Keynsham’s history, the Roman villa discovered at Durley Hill, the Roman house
at Somerdale and the Medieval Abbey (the remains of which are In Keynsham,
Memorial Park). Excavated in the 1920’s the material from both Somerdale and
Durley Hill had previously been held in the museum at the Cadbury’s site. The
storage situation in Keynsham Town Hall was by no means ideal including
stonework laid out as it had been excavated or would have been constructed
originally. With the closure of the Town Hall and the demolition of the building
imminent, the accessioning of the collections had to be done in unusual circumstances
on a tight time scale, before being moved to where they are currently stored at
our Pixash Lane Archaeology Store.

Window from Keynsham Abbey laid out in Town Hall basement

Since the collection was accessioned in 2011 work has been
carried out on some of the collection to produce a more detailed catalogue of
information, however this has not been comprehensive, and as such there are
large portions of the collection that need further cataloguing.

The collection from Keynsham Abbey comprises some 2200 objects
predominantly excavated in advance of the building of Keynsham Bypass in the
1960s. Many of these objects have only a basic identification, in order that
the collection can be best made accessible, further information identifying
each object is needed. The collection is currently organised by type of
material, which makes dividing jobs quite easy; and so it was that in September
a band of local volunteers started cataloguing the Medieval floor tiles.
Barbara Lowe, the key excavator of Keynsham Abbey had published a catalogue of
the tiles and to date the accessioning of the tiles had related to the tile
design in the publication.

One of the Medieval tiles photographed by volunteers

Our local volunteers have valiantly begun photographing,
weighing and describing the 34 boxes of Medieval tiles, using this publication
as a reference; they’ve also been measuring stonework and accessioning even
more tiles…and let’s not forget helping with an open day!

The Roman Baths at Night

The Roman Baths Bloggers

We are the volunteers, interns and employees of the Roman Baths. We started this blog to provide you with a behind the scenes glimpse of what goes on here at the Roman Baths. We will be writing about what is interesting and important to us from collections to activities and events.